CfP Winter School "Transmedia Character Studies: Interdisciplinary and Media-comparative Approaches" (original) (raw)

Fictional characters are of the greatest significance for contemporary and historical forms of intermediality, media convergence, and transmedia storytelling. In the last decades, a transdisciplinary field of research-informally addressed as "transmedia character studies"has been emerging from the dialogues of literature studies, film studies, game studies, and media studies together with many other disciplines such as communication studies, fan studies, semiotics, anthropology, psychology, gender studies, or area studies (like American studies or Japanese studies). There have also been important foundations for a truly transmedia character theory in recent years that do not take specific media as their starting points. Characters in all these contexts are usually understood as "recognizable fictional beings with attributed capacities for intentionality" (Eder 2008a, 77). Rainer Leschke respectively speaks of "characters in the emphatic sense" (2010, 21). Represented human protagonists of narrative media form the "unmarked cases" for such entities, although robots, aliens, or monsters equally fall under this category as long as they activate a so-called "person schema" (Smith 1995, 21) of prototypical anthropomorphic qualities such as their capacity to act, to communicate, or merely to form conscious thought.